1. Field of the Invention
The invention described herein relates to communications between computer users.
2. Related Art
With current communication technologies, people often attempt to communicate with others in a blind manner. The initiator does not know if the intended contact is currently present at the contact's usual location, or whether the contact is available to communicate. To compound matters, the initiator often must leave a message that the intended contact receives at some later point. The contact now becomes the initiator and the whole scenario repeats itself. In the telephone medium, this is known as “phone tag.” This problem is compounded when a multi-participant conference needs to be established. Typically, a cumbersome coordination process must occur where all intended participants are first contacted to make sure they are available for a certain time slot. If the coordinator gets half way through the list of participants only to find that the designated time slot does not work, the whole process must be restarted.
In recent years, buddy list applications have appeared which provide presence information about one's contacts. With these applications, it is easy to determine whether a contact (or buddy) is currently online or perhaps away from their desk. It also provides the ability to decide whether to establish contact “on the spot” via an instant message. There are several limitations to current buddy list applications. Most notably, segmentation of the namespace has occurred with buddy list applications due to a lack of standards and marketing battles between service providers. This prevents people from having global access to everyone connected to the Internet. Instead, a user is limited to users of the same buddy list application. Further, these applications tend to be large in size, require a separate download and installation process, and do not allow users to selectively manage their availability to people, meetings, and events.